Following a brief loan spell at Birmingham City, O’Reilly left Palace in 1991, re-joining Brighton for a final year before retiring and moving into sports broadcasting with the likes of BBC Sport, Sky Sports and IMG, among others.
Speaking to the [Official Palace Podcast](https://www.cpfc.co.uk/palace-tv/palace-podcast/) in 2020, O’Reilly said of his time at the club: “It was a very interesting environment to be in!
“You couldn’t walk into a dressing room like we had then, stamp your foot and say ‘this place is mine’ – not with a dressing room like we had then. You’d be lighting yourself up and sticking yourself in the crosshairs! If you started to engage, and if you didn’t have the wherewithal to do it…
“Some of the memories are fresh, some of them are like ‘wow, that happened, I remember that!’ But what’s struck me the most is how it \[the FA Cup run\] has sat in people’s memories – the effect, not just on Palace fans, but the impact the semi-final and the final has had on the greater football family… We served up two of the best games they’d seen for some time in FA Cup.
“It’s funny how these games, the semi-final and final itself, had such a legacy in the football landscape – even though we decided not to win, which was big of us!”
Happy birthday, Gary!